The Reemergence Of Liberation Theologies

This book brings together prominent voices from the global North and South to present brief analyses of liberation theology's future. It includes leaders in the field along with the newest voices. Each of these pieces was presented in the American Academy of Religion in the first five years of the Liberation Theologies Consultation.

First Published in 1991. The following is a comprehensive scholarly bibliography of published materials on the varieties of liberation theology, mostly in book form, available in English. It is intended as an introductory survey to this vast and quickly expanding field for the teacher and student of contemporary theology, of biblical hermeneutics, and to the interrelationship of politics and religion around the world. It will also serve as a comprehensive bibliography.

This book brings together prominent voices from the global North and South to present brief analyses of liberation theology's future. It includes leaders in the field along with the newest voices. Each of these pieces was presented in the American Academy of Religion in the first five years of the Liberation Theologies Consultation.

This work deals with the basic questions that are tackled by liberation theology - oppression, violence, domination and marginalization. It then goes on to show how the Christian faith can be used as an agent in promoting social and individual liberation, and how faith and politics relate.

Simultaneously arising out of such diverse contexts as the black community in the United States, grassroots religious communities in Latin America, and feminist circles in North Atlantic countries, theologies of liberation have emerged as a resource and inspiration for people seeking social and political freedom. Over the last three decades, liberation theology has irrevocably altered religious thinking and practice throughout the Americas. Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity and the Americas provides a meaningful and spirited debate on vital interpretive issues in religion, philosophy, and ethics. The renowned group of scholars explore liberation theologies' uses of discourses of emancipation, revolution and utopia in contrast with postmodernism's suspicion of grand narratives, while assessing what the postmodernism/liberation debate means for strategies of social and political transformation. Guided by the experiences of those at the margins of social power, liberation theologies demystify the eurocentric myths of secularization and modernity, and calls for a re-appraisal of religion in contemporary societies. Contributors: Edmund Arens, David Batstone, Maria Clara Bingemer, Enrique Dussel, Gustavo Gutierrez, Jurgen Habermas, Franz Hinkelammert, Dwight Hopkins, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Eduardo Mendieta, Amos Nascimento, Elsa Tamez, Mark McLain Taylor, and Sharon Welch, Robert Allen Warrior

Liberation theologies are the most important theological movement of our time. In the 20th century, their influence shook the Third and First Worlds, grass root organizations and the affluent Western academy, as well as the lives of priests and laypeople persecuted and murdered for living out their understanding of the Christian message. In the 21st C their insights and goals remain – unfortunately – as valid as ever.

The publication of this volume marks the Ten Year Anniversary of the Postcolonialism and Religions series. In intersectional and interdisciplinary perspectives, the chapters of this book constitute a complex whole: a volume that does justice to the justice-seeking origins of Latin American Liberation Theology, philosophy, and sociology as it emerged in the 1960s-70s and its development to the present. What drives this book is a common spirit and conviction: Liberation Theologies of the Global South remain relevant to the sociocultural and geopolitical contexts of today, which remain ensconced in the dynamics, exclusions, and resistances that gave rise to Liberation Theologies six decades ago. Today we may speak of interculturality, of borderlands, of in-betweenness, in ways that complicate, confirm, affirm, and interrogate the “underside of history”, and the spaces that are marginalized but de-centered centers of liberation struggle — within, alongside, underneath, over-against societal projects that claim and exclude them, and that represent some of the actual challenges and opportunities to liberation.